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Originally Posted by Samara
Another thing: COMMUNICATION. How would dinosaurs communicate? Their mouths don't seem developed enough to form actual speech (I'm not an expert on such things, I'm merely looking at it from a layperson's view) Unless they used honkings or hoots. But that makes no sense, because there are only so many types of honks or hoots one can make.
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I suspect this is human bias.
I mean, somewhere in an alternate universe, I can imagine a distant maiasaur descendent saying, "Another thing: COMMUNICATION. How would mammals communicate? They don't have any crests, so they can't make most of the sounds we use. Most of them can manage only two or three octaves at best, so there are only so many tones they can make. A mammalian language would be pretty much limited to
squeak squeak squeak squark sweak . . . wash off mudbath and repeat."
I'm pretty interested in some of the new findings about animal "language," actually. I know dolphins and whales are a favorite candidate for near-human intelligence and language, but I have a few others I think we should listen to. Elephants, for example. A lot of elephant noises are infra-sound, and I suspect that there's a fair bit of complexity there. I'd love to see a nice in-depth study of this.
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And what about written language? Certainly any "intelligent"(intelligent meaning capable of forming a society)dinosaurs would come up with some form of written language - even pictographs!
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Well, most settled human groups form a written language sooner or later, to be sure. Foragers (the new, PC term for hunter-gatherers, IIRC) always have art of some type--it's kind of a feature of humanity--but they don't always have writing. It might be a feature of
civilization, but not IMO of society.
Izunya